— I absolutely love this CPU - it manages to chew through rendering (hobby) & data analysis & ML (work) tasks like no tomorrow, and manages to put my R7 1800X to shame even in single threaded performance (better ram support helps a LOT - managed to get it running at 3466MTs). On top of that, its been beating my 1080tis in Blender Cycles rendering. The huge amount of PCIe bandwidth and memory bandwidth is also absolutely wonderful. Plus, it runs games just fine (Though I'm gpu bottlenecked on my current setup, since I run at 4k) All for just $999!

— An amazing comeback by AMD, bringing good performing octo-core and better performing SMT at relatively affordable prices. Sure it might not have the best possible single core performance (vs some of intel's higher clocked parts), but honestly, at the level it performs, it doesn't matter. I got it for workstation tasks + gaming. Blows away rendering, and I'm playing games (not shooters) on 4K, so I'm gpu bound anyhow. Also, having the boatloads of extra cores means I can do things like play games AND render 3D or process big datasets at the same time!